favorite poetry collections

Favorite writing is always a personal bent and may or may not be easily explained or defended – nor is there the need to do that. It is what it is. Here are my favorite collections that are always present with me. A constant river.

 
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Requiem by Anna Akhmatova

Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior) by Matsuo Bashō

Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen) by Charles Baudelaire

Farming: A Hand Book by Wendell Berry

Music Like Dirt by Frank Bidart

Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

In a Time of Violence by Eavan Boland

El hacedor (Dreamtigers) by Jorge Luis Borges

Plainwater by Anne Carson

The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt

Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton

The Bridge by Hart Crane

And Her Soul Out of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis

The Complete Poems (Johnson Edition, 1955) by Emily Dickinson

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

The Wild Iris by Louise Glück

Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century by Joy Harjo

Praise by Robert Hass

American Sonnets for Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes

Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield

Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa

Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser

The Only World by Lynda Hull

Winter Stars by Larry Levis

The Need to Hold Still by Lisel Mueller

Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada by Pablo Neruda

Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara

The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds

American Primitive by Mary Oliver

Of Being Numerous by George Oppen

Ariel: The Restored Edition by Sylvia Plath

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Poeta en San Francisco by Barbara Jane Reyes

The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich

Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

Une Saison en Enfer by Arthur Rimbaud

The Speed of Darkness by Muriel Rukeyser

Transformations by Anne Sexton

Motel Chronicles by Sam Shepard

Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

Mountains and Rivers Without End by Gary Snyder

Even in Quiet Places by William Stafford

You by Frank Stanford

Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

Harmonium by Wallace Stevens

The Forest by Susan Stewart

Ordinary Words by Ruth Stone

People on a Bridge by Wisława Szymborska

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Spring and All by William Carlos Williams

Chickamauga by Charles Wright

The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright